Terry Allen: Cowboy and the Stranger

Album Narrative

Comprising the first recording, in 2018, of a song written in 1969 and three solo demo recordings dating to 1968—all previously unissued—Cowboy and the Stranger is a co-release of L.A. Louver and Paradise of Bachelors (LAL-054/PoB-054), on the occasion of Terry Allen’s 2019 retrospective drawing exhibition The Exact Moment It Happens in the West (Stories, Pictures, and Songs from the ’60s ’Til Now) at L.A. Louver.

SIDE ONE

Recorded at Kitchen Sink Studios, Santa Fe, NM, November 2018.
Engineered by Jono Manson.

ROSES RED ROSES 

And all that had happened
Happened over again

Written in 1969 “under mind-expanding and/or mind-dismembering circumstances,” this long narrative ballad, a brutally violent Western tragedy about the travels and tribulations of a gunslinging Shawnee “girl of mystery” who “fires her long rifle at the sun going down,” remained unrecorded (“ancient and buried”) for fifty years.  

SIDE TWO

Recorded in Los Angeles, CA, c. 1968.
Master tapes transferred by Curtis Peoples, courtesy of Texas Tech University.

COWBOY AND THE STRANGER

The cowboy is lying under blood-cloud sky
The cowboy is dying under blood-loud sky

Cowboy and the Stranger, a “prelude to JUAREZ,” was one of Allen’s early attempts to combine music and image in non-illustrative counterpoint. The show, exhibited at Michael Walls Gallery in San Francisco in 1970, featured framed drawings with tape reels affixed to their backs, as well as ambulatory musical performances in which Allen wheeled a piano to various pieces and performed different songs in conversation with them.

TRUCKLOAD OF ART

Precious objects are scattered
All over the ground

The occupational anthem of art handlers everywhere, “Truckload of Art” is a centerpiece of Lubbock (on everything) (1979). But an earlier recording, featuring Don Everly and James Burton, appeared in Monte Hellman’s cult classic 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, starring James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as cross-country hot-rodding heartthrobs (listen for it briefly blasting from the tape deck of antagonist Warren Oates’s GTO). This demo version likely predates that recording.

RED BIRD

I been born, and I’m gonna die
Blood-red wing, gonna make me fly

“Red Bird” is one of Allen’s first compositions that “felt like a real song” to him. “Written sometime in the fall of 1964,” he performed it three years later on the TV variety program Shindig!, pounding the piano and tooting a kazoo while the teenaged studio audience, which included the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, screamed.